Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Spectacular failures to replicate key scientific findings have been documented of late, particularly in biology, psychology and medicine.

A report on the issue, published in Nature this May, found that about 90 percent of some 1,576 researchers surveyed now believe there is a reproducibility crisis in science.

While this rightly tarnishes the public belief in science, it also has serious consequences for governments and philanthropic agencies that fund research, as well as the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. It means they could be wasting billions of dollars on research each year.

One contributing factor is easily identified. It is the high rate of so-called false discoveries in the literature. They are false-positive findings and lead to the erroneous perception that a definitive scientific discovery has been made.

This high rate occurs because the studies that are published often have low statistical power to identify a genuine discovery when it is there, and the effects being sought are often small.

Further, dubious scientific practices boost the chance of finding a statistically significant result, usually at a probability of less than one in 20. In fact, our probability threshold for acceptance of a discovery should be more stringent, just as it is for discoveries of new particles in physics.

The English mathematician and the father of computing Charles Babbage noted the problem in his 1830 book Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes. He formally split these practices into "hoaxing, forging, trimming and cooking."

As with all institutions in this latter day, social justice convergence is having its deleterious effects in science. This is why a strict division between scientistry and scientody is absolutely vital; science-SJWs profit from the nebulous nature of the term "science" and use it to cloak their convergent activities.

The problem is not "with what is mostly government funded science." It's a problem throughout the science industry, particularly pharmaceutical research. Depending on self-calculated confidence intervals, and desperately searching for serendipitous results hoping for the next aspartame or Viagra is a large part of it. The despaerate need to publish and the difficulty in publishing negative experimental outcomes all contribute.

The English mathematician and the father of computing Charles Babbage noted the problem in his 1830 book Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes.

Interesting data point. He wrote about this between the two industrial revolutions. This suggests that science in a civilization with sufficient enough means of information transfer *could* progress in periods of rapid innovation followed by lulls where lazy mid-wits try to pick over the pieces of the blazed trails.

If that is the case, we may be on the verge of another rapid advancement (AI/robotics?) that will ultimately over shadow the fairly lax and questionable scientific advancement over the last 15-20 years.

Have a look at the graphs on reproducible results. Physics and engineering are no better than medicine.http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970

Further, dubious scientific practices boost the chance of finding a statistically significant result, usually at a probability of less than one in 20. In fact, our probability threshold for acceptance of a discovery should be more stringent, just as it is for discoveries of new particles in physics.

Uh oh, is this Poe's Law at work? Dubious new particles, like the Higgs Boson, are alleged to be extracted from reams of data that border on noise.

SO, what to do? There are thousands and thousands of people trying to publish their results. In order to be specialist in some domain, you have to read hundreds of papers. So, you need some kind of filter, otherwise you will be burdened with tons and tons of BS.

That was not much of a problem when literacy was rare and publishing was costly. Probably, you would start to rely on bunch of people you consider authorities, you would grade papers as worthy to read. Those people would then probably create their own institutions, though maybe they won't be called "journals". Someone would try to profit from the situation, seeing that there is a demand which needs to be fulfilled.

I would not say this is simply "a problem with SJW-scientists". There is no incentive to publish negative results or replicating. It's a logical consequence of incentives given to a pack of above-the-average-intelligence people.

Hey, leave engineering out of this. We produce results that work in the real world.

And I've got nearly two dozen professional papers and presentations to my credit...so I'm no stranger to that field. But I confine my professional writing to methods, not results. For flight test, that's of greater interest to my compatriots.

Get rid of government funding for science research and the problem will solve itself. Currently the large bureaucracies that give the grants required to get tenure in most second tier and below universities hold too great a sway over the budding academics. These government groups set the goals and priorities and are needed for the grants. Private funding would cull the herd appropriately.

@13 Engineering. Yeah, I remember HugeSoftwareCompany guy giving a presentation to my students "if you want something to be formally proven to be correct and optimized... then do not choose working in our company. Stay in Academia. We just want things which work good enough and are delivered on time"

And then there are things like algorithms and long-known solutions which are rediscovered by some arrogant engineers who wouldn't ever spent time reading some basic theory book.

Speaking as a quality control mook, reproducibility is EVERYTHING when it comes to testing. If I take ten parts, and consistently break them in through a given point at X tensile strength? I can point to that and say 'there's your weak point. Right there.' If you can't reproduce the failures, you're not going to be able to address the problem (and at that point, you might need to readdress what the problem actually is).

Doesn't surprise me that psychology is having problems. That's barely a science as is. Kind of sad about biology and medicine though; discoveries and those can make the difference between 'you die/are crippled for the rest of your lifespan' and 'you survive and make a full recovery'. Having bullshit fog up the signal-to-noise ratio is bad for all of us.

justaguy wrote:Get rid of government funding for science research and the problem will solve itself. It won't, unless by private funding you mean millionaires who examine every research they fund by themselves.

it also has serious consequences for governments and philanthropic agencies that fund research, as well as the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. It means they could be wasting billions of dollars on research each year.

It's not a consequence if the objectives were never related to actual science in the first place.

The article gets things backwards in one place (I think, please correct me if I am the one who is confused). The first paragraph I quote below is supposed to lead to the conclusion in the second paragraph, but the author wrote the second paragraph incorrectly. The author says in the first paragraph that false positives are the problem, and in the second paragraph says the false positives are due to low statistical power. That's not correct. Low statistical power means one risks failing to detect an effect that is actually present. The problem of false positives is due to what's called a Type I error, which is falsely declaring an effect is found when none actually exists.

Both low statistical power and a high Type I error rate can be caused by a small sample size. However, I think both mistakes usually occur because the statistical model used is wrong; that is, the assumptions about the experimental or observational conditions are incorrect. For example, the model may have assumed an instrument was properly calibrated but it wasn't, or the mice were from a single strain when several were not, the bacteria used were 99% alive and yet most were dead, proper randomization did not take place and there were effects that were not accounted for in the model, etc...

Further, I think that a statistical model should always be tested by doing further runs of an experiment to see if it actually predicts what happens. And not just one or two checks, but multiple checks of its predictive capability. Then, and only then, publish.

"One contributing factor is easily identified. It is the high rate of so-called false discoveries in the literature. They are false-positive findings and lead to the erroneous perception that a definitive scientific discovery has been made.

This high rate occurs because the studies that are published often have low statistical power to identify a genuine discovery when it is there, and the effects being sought are often small."

Whups, looks like they pulled the link from http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2016/07/talking-about-bad-science-being-funded tohttp://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970

which was in the second sentence at "90 percent". The Nature paper has an "Earth and Environment" category with considerably less than the 97% confidence claimed by the Climate Change Global Warming people. https://weather.com/science/environment/news/agreement-manmade-global-warming-20130516

The usual suspects are attempting to crush free speech and scientific research - https://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/05.18.16%20SST%20Letter%20to%20WA%20AG.pdf

https://science.house.gov/news/letters/gop-member-letter-state-attorneys-general-coordinated-efforts-deprive-scientists-firstLooks similar to the SJW hate speech law campaigns. They're pressuring State Attorneys General to prosecute "Climate Deniers"!

@19 It won't, unless by private funding you mean millionaires who examine every research they fund by themselves.

Not really. If I had a billion I'd make funding proportional to working models or sub-components. With a timeline to kill the project if there are no results.

Governments and universities will pour billions into a less than proven idea such as the tokamak fusion model, thinking we'll just overcome the problems as they occur. Twenty plus years later that thing still isn't working, yet there are smaller fusion research labs that are making promising working models at a fraction of a percent of the cost dumped into "big" fusion. In other words, the investors have skin in the game instead of OPM (other peoples money).

szopen wrote:We just want things which work good enough and are delivered on time"

And he was correct.Commercially, having the academically correct solution is not worth a lot compared to first-mover advantage. And it's worth nothing at all compared to proper project management discipline.

Good enough really is good enough.

You mean the fact that scientists are pointing to the problem and search for solutions is a proof that science is not self-correcting? There is nothing inherent to science in this. It's purely cultural. And we'll see if it makes any difference.

I'd be more inclined to paraphrase Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to ideological malice what can be adequately explained by greed, selfishness and shortsightedness. "Publish the positives or perish" is all the distortion you need, I think.

Which is not to say "please your politico peers for permission to publish" isn't a factor as well, but even if it vanished tomorrow we would still have that basic problem with the paradigm. (Possibly.)

Speaking as a quality control mook, reproducibility is EVERYTHING when it comes to testing

As far as reproducibility goes, one of the biggest malpractice cases I have ever heard of was a non Asian minority mammography woman whose job it was to come in 1/2 early to do less than 5 min worth of QA every day after the equipment warmed up, got busted putting the exact same temperature in logs down to the decimal point for a full year(not bothering to do the QA). Forced thousands of women to get new mammograms. It was in either PA or NJ.

szopen wrote:You mean the fact that scientists are pointing to the problem and search for solutions is a proof that science is not self-correcting?Saying, "something is broken" is not a correction. "Here's a problem" could just mean more running around in circles moaning "woe is us, woe is us." Or, even worse, "nothing to see here. Move along."

When scientists actually fix the problem, then you can talk about science being self-correcting.

szopen wrote:I would not say this is simply "a problem with SJW-scientists". There is no incentive to publish negative results or replicating. It's a logical consequence of incentives given to a pack of above-the-average-intelligence people.

Wait, you mean to say that scientists need incentives? That here has to be a reward for doing the right thing? Whatever happened to the mantra, "we don't need an invisible sky wizard to reward us to get us to behave rightly"?

@15 justaguyGet rid of government funding for science research and the problem will solve itself.

I have been saying this for years. The leading cause of AGW is government funded research.

If there is no crisis, there is no need for research. Therefore, in order to turn the financial faucet on, create a crisis. In the '80s people didn't get up in arms about the global cooling scare. That may be because those were pre-interwebz days, but there was less government funding for global cooling than there was for methane production in bovine intestines and why people preferred their catsup red rather than other colors.

Why global warming took off is beyond me. I'd much rather be warm than cold.

If you know how statistical analysis works and really get it, then you also know how easy it is to get false positives, typically correlation without causation. Combine that with a SJWarrior and the numbers tell you whatever you want to hear.

"Why global warming took off is beyond me. I'd much rather be warm than cold."

Global warming took off because of two factors:

1) People born between 1970 and 1980 who realized that winters around the turn of the millennium didn't feel as cold or as long as they had when they were kids (there was a mild warming trend between 1970 and 1998), and were easily persuaded that their experience was representative of the world's fate;

2) The fact that the overwhelming majority of media professionals live and work in the Los Angeles/New York city areas, which thanks to their constant expansion and thus the expansion of the "urban heat island" effect are the only places where temperatures haven't on average dropped after 2006-2007.

People are inherent projectors. We all assume our personal experiences represent "the way things really are" if we don't get into the habit of strict and rigorous counterchecking.

Why global warming took off is beyond me. I'd much rather be warm than cold.

Funding, messaging... the theme of original sin and salvation running through environmentalism (before white privilege and things exploded) was in there. Anything that makes story-sense to people tends to spread.

Nevermind that historically, warming periods are good for us and cooling periods are bad for us, mainly on disease, crops, infant mortality and economy.

Orville wrote:@19It won't, unless by private funding you mean millionaires who examine every research they fund by themselves.

Not really. If I had a billion I'd make funding proportional to working models or sub-components. With a timeline to kill the project if there are no results.

Sure, but this is similar to what is happening now. You get grant but then you have to prove you got the results. The problem is that the people who grade the project usually have no idea about the science. These are finance managers and lawyers. So they want easy statistics: number of published papers, produced software and so on. And that's what they get.

That's why I said that you need a millionaire who would personally investigate the results, otherwise you will have just a bunch of guys who just want to cover their arses: "hey, we graded this project A+ because it checked in all the rows of the table >>project achievements<<"

wrf3 wrote:szopen wrote:I would not say this is simply "a problem with SJW-scientists". There is no incentive to publish negative results or replicating. It's a logical consequence of incentives given to a pack of above-the-average-intelligence people.

Wait, you mean to say that scientists need incentives?

You have not understood. I have not said "scientists NEED incentives". I said that scientists are human, and humans always react to incentives. There are scientists who would so science without any reward.

When the incentives appear, they drive human behaviour.

Imagine there would be an privately-funded institution giving stipendium to most efficient alt-right thinkers. Initially it would give stipendiums to worthy writers. Over time, however, the institution would hire clerks with economy degree who wouldn't really care about alt-right, or whether those thinkers are really valuable or not. They would care about their own jobs, so they would want to have clear measures who is alt-right thinker deserving to have a stipendium.

Imagine then, that the criterion would be number of comments in blog posts.

Soon you would have real thinkers competing with frauds and average thinkers to get the most comments.

Lots of crises of legitimacy in various institutions these days. Thus, desperate attempts to mine legitimacy from high-respect fields like science. Unfortunately, the reason science works is that it has an ability to take out the trash -- an ability that is now challenged by the recent massive influx of legitimacy miners (SJW's, but also "new players" from cultures with different values). Science will probably normalize eventually, but I suspect it will require some new and parallel methods of taking out the trash.

Snidely Whiplash wrote:Commercially, having the academically correct solution is not worth a lot compared to first-mover advantage. And it's worth nothing at all compared to proper project management discipline.That's true - however this leads to certain ruts in thinking routines. This also means that engineer, who lives by principle "who cares about the general case, we will sent apology letter if something goes wrong[1]", does not really have right to sneer at academics when they discuss whether something is, in general, true or false.

[1] True story. My friend created a solution which would cause one system to work in every possible case, automagically masking all possible errors at the cost of significant delays (in the worst case). I do not know the details, but I remember the answer he got from industry partners.

The industry guys said "are you nuts? If something goes wrong, we do not want automatic correction. We want a real live person calling our clients, apologising them and giving them a feel of a solution tailored for their personal needs".

Yeah, scientists should be forced to leave the academia and work in their field for few years :)

The entire public research industry is an enormous con, and a massive drain on taxpayer's funds.

The government funds "scientific" research on the pretext that it creates jobs and is therefore good for the working stiffs actually paying for it. It's basically very cheap electioneering for the government.

The University's receive enormous unearned funds, by which they massively grow their own empires, employing thousands more post-doc students and graduates.

The "scientific" journals charge the researchers/universities to publish their research papers, receiving enormous unearned benefits from their symbiotic relationship, and then they charge the taxpayers - who fucking paid for the research in the first place! - to read the papers. The researchers then deny the taxpayers access to the raw data (by which means somebody somewhere might actually reveal the nature and scale of the con) on the basis of "commercial sensitivity"(!)

The overweening mania for novelty of research (when it is painfully obvious, and has been for a long time, that much of it needs re-doing, simply to check that any was actually done) leaves "Science" with an enormously sturdy trunk, a few solid branches and a growing number of rotten ones, and a billion tiny hairs of highly dubious provenance and worth.

Nary a green leaf to be seen.

The whole fucking boondoggle is also a massive ego trip for all involved. Researchers preen about the "high impact" journals they get published in. Journals preen about the big name science celebs they publish. Universities preen about the big name science celebs they employ. Politicians preen about the research ratings of 'their' universities.

Taxpayers get fucked six ways. We pay for it all, get charged to read it, charged again to see the data, told we're ignorant fuckers because we don't have the data, and have to watch all this ego wanking on every media channel there is.

I have engaged with some of these science-true-believers, trying to explain to them that if the studies are built on nonreproducible results, there only logical thing to do is immediately stop everything, treat this as a crisis, and bend all efforts to fixing this, because everything you do before then is in vain.

Now, we've all dealt with sjws or other weak thinkers, and there's always an excuse at hand for whatever their position is. But this was one of those rare cases where it became clear that they were completely clueless as to how to respond. The idea that you can't build on a crappy foundation is so foreign to them they literally can not think the thought. The idea that you might have to do something other than march forward with perhaps minor deviations is too foreign a thought to think. The counterarguments boiled down to little more than "But...!"

And so on they march, because no one person has the power to stop it. Scientists can't seem to band together to stop. The funding agencies can't afford to admit to their bosses that they've been wasting billions of dollars for decades. Those who have hitched their wagon to science, like warmists, can't stop. So we pointlessly meander along, making worse use of our resources than if we just took the money and gave it to the scientists to do nothing.

Just another nail in the coffin called "Public Trust in our Institutions". So many other areas that need cleaning up. I would start with elementary schools and remove all SJW ideology, ensure males teach males, and neutralize further feminist brain-washing.

Just another nail in the coffin called "Public Trust in our Institutions". So many other areas that need cleaning up. I would start with elementary schools and remove all SJW ideology, ensure males teach males, and neutralize further feminist brain-washing.

You have impression that my English is fine becase your brain automatically corrects smaller errors, like typos, missing articles and so on :) For example, have you noticed I have written "becase" instead of "because"?

There is no requirement in the scientific method for a model to be formed at all, let alone a specifically mathematical one. Merely a hypothesis is formed. The requirement of the hypothesis is that it be falsifiable, not that it be mathematical. If several hypotheses all arise from a model of the system being studied, then science can prove the falsity (but never the truth) of that model, if allowed to.

Far more often what happens is that the model is adjusted to fit the data by adding complexity, until the epicycles within epicycles within epicycles can no longer be supported. c.f. string theory.

Models, mathematical or otherwise are only useful in science as a generator of hypotheses.

szopen wrote:For example, have you noticed I have written "becase" instead of "because"?No doubt you didn't notice I frequently type becasue rather than because and governement rather than government. In fact, I doubt I often get two sentences out on this blog without a word left out, or a glaring typo or other error.

I sees a bright future for Tor Books in Scientific publication: Grrrl-Science papers, pier-reviewed by distinguished scientists like John Scalzi and Dick-Dawk. Who knows what amazing new discoveries await?

Richard Feynman started calling "bullshit" back in the 1970s, and reiterated it in one of his books later. He said the problem was already recognized by older scientists who'd seen fundamental results "creep" to new values.

Of course other physicists ignored him, probably because they were jealous that he made a few record albums and hung out in topless bars.

Nonsense. Francesco Redi's meat-in-jars test of spontaneous generation did not require any math beyond the ability to the difference between "no maggots" and "some maggots". It would be the height of pedantry to attempt to claim the number zero as a mathematical model.

The culture of public science is moderately broken for many reasons, but partly because of that old management problem that your employees start chasing the metrics you employ. Also because of government indiscriminately chasing success after certain fields produced so much, like physics and medicine. And more, of course.

Some days ago we also discussed very high-IQ persons and the fact that they in practice do not fit into the conventional professions. I thought this seemed plausible; most any profession has an IQ ceiling whereafter other factors become dominant (perhaps such as bureaucratic dealing, grant seeking, patience/conscientiousness, and so on). Including the prestigious ones.

Instead these high-IQ individuals are lost, sometimes tragically, and seldom contribute in any degree compared to their measured intelligence. So why not give those with a measured IQ of, say, 160 or more (4 standard deviations) tenure in the form of a room and reasonable though modest salary, and then let them do what they will? It seems likely this would be more helpful to society than much of what is done today, not to mention capturing the value of the very high-IQ segment. In a population of 300 million, I think that means 9500-19000 positions of tenure by the way, perhaps $2-4 bn per year. (Depending on whether the dodgy table I looked up provided a one or two-sided interval. But that's just a factor 2 which can be neglected for our purposes.)

[Yes, in today's climate such grants would obviously be abused beyond recognition by being handed out to allies howling for sinecures, but wouldn't it be nice? I'm afraid I wouldn't get one myself, by a long shot, but in this case I think the gains to society are potentially great. Those who want more than that modest salary could always try to make money in other ways.]

And #72, Omegas hardest hit. For various reasons, I think Omegas are naturally more honest than other types. One reason, for all the non-Omegas, is that you have to have kinda a clue as to what is going on to come up with a 'good' lie. Another reason, is that O's tend to be disgusted by well, a lot. And honesty is one thing you can cling too in a mad, mad world. In the O version of the Emperor's New Clothes, there is no little boy, and its not just the Emperor, its everyone, including the Omega who is naked.

Spartacus xxxxx wrote:Have a look at the graphs on reproducible results. Physics and engineering are no better than medicine.Physics & engineering, chemistry and biology are rated considerably better than medicine. Do you have any experience reading graphs?

The same piece says that researchers who tried to publish their reproductions, positive or negative, were successful more often than not. It's more likely that the problem isn't publishing but getting grant money to do the work in the first place.

szopen wrote:then there are things like algorithms and long-known solutions which are rediscovered by some arrogant engineers who wouldn't ever spent time reading some basic theory book.A few months in the laboratory can often save you a couple hours in the library.

The real problem is that many algorithms really are that obvious, yet someone has been able to patent them anyway. When I last tangled with patented algorithms I instantly came up with the two patented ones for the problem I was paid to work on.

Extracted by computers, and they'll almost certainly not tell you how, so that if you couldn't replicate it if you tried. Not that you could try, because you don't have the necessary blajillion dollar machine.

Seperation of science and state, for one. To the highest degree possible. Too much money in science altogether, but that's a start. Vigorous ethical instruction of scientists, however feasible. I was going to say reacquaint them with the humanities, but not the humanities as they now are taught.

szopen wrote:Sure, but saying "here is a proposal to fix this problem" is a first step towards fixing a problem, and the process takes time (sometimes many decades). And there are proposals to fix the problem.I have a proposal to fix my being overweight. Eat less, exercise more. The process takes time.

But it's worthless if I don't actually do it.

The problem isn't corrected until the problem is corrected. Talking about it, even taking a first step, is worthless as anyone who has tried dieting for a week and then giving up knows all too well.

The problem is, they hit the same wall: the literature on "how to carry an open science" and "how to increase reproducibility" becomes larger and larger.But if science is "self-correcting", as you so very much want it to be, surely this is no obstacle.

If you really want to make the claim that science is self-correcting, then stop mouthing empty platitudes, stop making excuses for a lack of progress, and actually correct the problem.

So if science wants to be self-correcting, then the first thing that should happen is for the right incentives to be put in place. But for that to happen, either the scientists are going to have to become saints, and reject wrong incentives; or the scientists are going to have to change the behavior of the politicians. Good luck with that.

@63-String theory does fit what you're talking about, because it doesn't fit or not fit anything, and you can't say it's no longer supported because it was never supported by anything in the first place. It's "not even wrong," just mathematical tiddlywinks.

Not really. If I had a billion I'd make funding proportional to working models or sub-components. With a timeline to kill the project if there are no results.

Sure, but this is similar to what is happening now. You get grant but then you have to prove you got the results. The problem is that the people who grade the project usually have no idea about the science. These are finance managers and lawyers. So they want easy statistics: number of published papers, produced software and so on. And that's what they get.

That's why I said that you need a millionaire who would personally investigate the results, otherwise you will have just a bunch of guys who just want to cover their arses: "hey, we graded this project A+ because it checked in all the rows of the table >>project achievements<<"

This is what chaps all the MBA ass about managing engineers. Typical MBA can't do it. Has to have an engineering BS; to see through the BS.

FALPhil wrote:In the '80s people didn't get up in arms about the global cooling scare. That may be because those were pre-interwebz daysNo, it was because THE ACTUAL PAPER stated that there was no sign of re-glaciation beginning yet (link to Rasool paper). A 1972 NSB report stated "widespread deforestation in recent centuries, especially in Europe and North America, together with increased atmospheric opacity due to man-made dust storms and industrial wastes, should have increased the Earth’s reflectivity. At the same time increasing concentration of industrial carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should lead to a temperature increase by absorption of infrared radiation from the Earth’s surface."

In other words, pretty much what climate scientists are telling you right now, minus the concern about aerosols (which are being controlled for other reasons). BTW, that was freaking 1971; Al Gore Jr., who you all love to tag as the creator of all this, wouldn't run for Congress until '76.

Why global warming took off is beyond me. I'd much rather be warm than cold.It's much less challenging to stay warm when it's dangerously cold out than to stay cool when it's dangerously hot out; stone-age humans can live in the Arctic winters but not the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. There were 15,000 or so deaths in France in a heat wave not all that long ago, when people couldn't get cool.

Extracted by computers, and they'll almost certainly not tell you how, so that if you couldn't replicate it if you tried. Not that you could try, because you don't have the necessary blajillion dollar machine.

I am a physicist, so take what I saw with a grain of salt, but there's a few real positives in experimental physics that help deter shenanigans.

1. The LHC data is public. (Check out the CERN Open Data Portal.)2. The algorithms and statistical methods are described in exhausting detail with huge numbers of papers on each part of the system.3. The collaborations involve huge numbers of people and unbelievable quantities of data, so no one (or two, or ten) PIs can be tempted to slightly fudge some numbers the way it's so easy to do in other fields.4. It's not small-N samples of fickle humans in medicine or anything like that. You need another billion data points to see if a seeming signal is just noise? Just let the machine hum for another few weeks.

And finally, and perhaps most saliently:

5. Despite the vast money and human effort poured into LHC, it has stubbornly failed to detect anything hinting at physics beyond the Standard Model. Just the old boring Higgs boson, which is interesting and important but predicted by old and already well-verified theory. LHC has not turned up a shred of evidence for supersymmetry or string theory, and in fact rules out a lot of their variants. If high energy physics is untrustworthy, you'd at least think they'd quit letting the machine fire eggs into the faces of the string theory community

Mr. Rational wrote:FALPhil wrote:In the '80s people didn't get up in arms about the global cooling scare. That may be because those were pre-interwebz days

No, it was because THE ACTUAL PAPER stated that there was no sign of re-glaciation beginning yet (link to Rasool paper). A 1972 NSB report stated "widespread deforestation in recent centuries, especially in Europe and North America, together with increased atmospheric opacity due to man-made dust storms and industrial wastes, should have increased the Earth’s reflectivity. At the same time increasing concentration of industrial carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should lead to a temperature increase by absorption of infrared radiation from the Earth’s surface."

In other words, pretty much what climate scientists are telling you right now...

They lie, they double down, they project, they steal, and they betray the whole human race. Sad to say, CO2 does not cause global warming, though we really wish it could. Why do you enable traitors?

The Earth is getting quite noticeably greener thanks to our carbon dioxide enrichment of the atmosphere. See, for one recent example-

Greening of the Earth and its drivers, Nature Climate Change, [2016], http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate3004.html

This is wonderful news for all of us. Anyone who does not think so is a traitor to all life on Earth. Do you hate life?

tublecane wrote:-String theory does fit what you're talking about, because it doesn't fit or not fit anything, and you can't say it's no longer supported because it was never supported by anything in the first place. It's "not even wrong," just mathematical tiddlywinks.It's an attempt to build a "mathematical model" of a bunch of disparate datapoints. "But the math is sooooooooo elegant!"

Snidely, I've got a small library I'll never get thru in this lifetime because I'm already middle aged moving, and life is always, without exception busy.I try to get really useful synopsis reading. Short precise summaries that are honest, intriguing, and really really Elegant. They satisfy Occam's razor, open up a world of possibilities to research and incorporate more data points of anomalous outliers than the other guys' models. BarrySetterfields work on a non constant C has stood the test of time. Light speed is now self defining = the most intellectually dishonest /absurd scientific magic trick (((ever))).For a light read in ZPE try here: Setterfield.org

@Phillip George.ZPE is another scan.I don't have time for scams.I have a batch of beer to brew, grandkids to look after, fences to repair, interesting reading to do. Reading yet another theorist who has found a loophole in the laws of thermodynamics isn't on the list.

happy days Snidely. You might have to when/if it overwhelms everything else.the speed of light though is like the intellectual bottle neck for many. How can a constant change when they simply MUST, MUST I tell you emphatically, be CONSTANT. Did I mention they MUST?

Phillip George wrote:the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia cover Savannah like world. The Sahara was a Savannah.When the Sahara was a savannah, atmospheric CO2 levels were around 200 ppm. 400 ppm is territory almost no living species has ever seen, and it remains to be seen if the ones we depend upon will survive it.

Mr Rational, the whole world was lush and green. CO2 levels are still precipitously low at 0.04 percent.What we and everything else on this earth has evolved in for AT LEAST the last million years never exceeded 300 ppm. We are in terra incognita, and IMO you are insane to blow this off.

What you'll try to say to Jesus on the Great White Throne Judgement won't involve the Arab peninsula."Why did you allow crazy people to make your case to children when I was one?" I wouldn't bother to ask why I'm arguing with the likes of those book-burners tonight instead of getting my own stuff done, that one's on me. But this is not a question I ever expect to get a chance to ask, because I take Jesus just as seriously as Kali and Thor.

Sad to say, CO2 does not cause global warming, though we really wish it could.Svante Arrhenius thought it would. And since you're a self-proclaimed expert on this matter, perhaps you could explain to this long-time physics nut how increasing the altitude at which the atmosphere allows IR radiation to space in the CO2 absorption bands by roughly 8,000 feet is NOT going to cause any global warming? So far NOBODY on VP has ever tried to touch this question.

Why do you enable traitors?Why do you let blatant propaganda that is obviously being orchestrated on both sides by the same interests blind you to what's going on? Why are you STILL blind to this when you have no doubt accepted that the Dems and the GOP establishment are also run by the same set of interests?

The traitors are those who keep us from going nuclear. They own the world's fossil fuels and sit on top of the financial pyramid they hold up. Depending on which of the two controlled camps you fall into, you either believe that radiation is deadlier than carbon and will burn coal to kill Diablo Canyon, or you take neither seriously and don't care if your children die of athsma due to the PM 2.5 from the stacks 2 states over.

None of you can even understand when someone tells you BOTH camps have been duped, because your minds are too small to entertain notions outside the Overton windows of your own particular tribes. You classify them as heresy and move on without thinking.

The design and intent of the testimg is to DISprove the theorem, not to fucking get published.

The *mechanism* for fixing science is thus plain and obvious; one qusrtyof all funding goes to reproducibility testing, with testers paid a bonus for every disproof, as is done with many software testers.

But getting government money out is also necessary as it is a massive corrupting influence. That part will soon happen of its own accord however, since our governments are actively working to bankrupt themselves...

spoken like a real evolutionist Mr Rational. LOL. Your offspring are demonstrably more evolved. Huff and Puff and tell yourself you are the real scientist. because tree rings, and proxy

I know an empiricist who pumps about 1000 ppm CO2 into his greenhouse.And look you are both doing it for the money. Him to sell stuff and you to get grant money for planet saving research. The money tracks to whose doorsteps.

You do know that at 160 parts per million life on earth, becomes extinct?But, hooray, some other lifeform would spring up in the brand new biotic soup, like it does in every evolutionist thinking. Because it MUST. Did I mention it must?

@90-So we can trust Big Physics because it hasn't gone completely nuts and endorsed the non-science of supersymmetry and string theory? But what about what it does endorse which is the increasingly epicycle-like "Standard Model." The model with which we've been stuck in a rut for decades, and which keeps adding particle after particle with no direct evidence. How many is it now? 70? I have no clue. And not just particle after particle, but spins and colors and flavors. Which every new physicist studies like monks study the Bible,after which they become the only experts and the only ones qualified to critique the thing their careers depend upon.

The Standard Model is in a classic Kuhniab crisis. They're going to have to chuck the whole thing, back to neutrinos at least, eventually. The LHC buttresses a decaying edifice. That it doesn't afflict us with other, worse falsehoods is hardly to its credit.

I really should put that question statement another way. Who has the best algorithm for predicting the distribution of cloud forming condensation nuclei between 5000 and 8000 feet between the july and august between the equator and tropic of cancer. Over to you Mr Rational for your preference in predictive algorithms.

beholdest thou the bullshit. One has to read down to the comments section to see any reference to Water Utilization Efficiency/Effects of CO2. ie. More stuff grows with exactly the same rainfalls when stomata require a shorter respiration cycles.

@Mr RationalAnd yet, where is the warming?Not as in why aren't we warmer, but why is not the upper troposphere in the equatorial latitudes not warming. All CO2-based global warming models agree on this, and you allude to it above. The upper troposphere in the equatorial latitudes is where the warming will be most pronounced, and this warming is where all the follow-on effects originate. And yet, somehow, they have not warmed in 40 years, despite tremendous increases in CO2.

See, here is how SCIENCE! worksHypothesis: Increasing the CO@ level in the atmosphere will result in increased temperatures in the upper troposphere, which will lead to increased water vapor int he atmosphere, leading to substantially increased temperatures at ground level and in the other parts of the atmsphere.

Test: increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

Observation: Substantially increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere do not result in higher temperatures in equatorial troposphere, nor to increased temperatures elsewhere.

@102Mr. Rational wrote:Svante Arrhenius thought it would. And since you're a self-proclaimed expert on this matter, perhaps you could explain to this long-time physics nut how increasing the altitude at which the atmosphere allows IR radiation to space in the CO2 absorption bands by roughly 8,000 feet is NOT going to cause any global warming? So far NOBODY on VP has ever tried to touch this question.

Either show where I proclaimed myself to be an "expert on this matter" or accept that you are a liar.

Arrhenius was mistaken. He did not understand how a greenhouse operates, so what he thought is irrelevant, though it has become a part of the lore of global warming.

The optical depth for CO2 absorbance in the 15 um and 4 um bands at STP and 400 ppm is on the order of 100 meter AGL, not 8000 feet in the troposphere. At 100 meter, this insignificant contribution to the insulating effect of the atmosphere is entirely captured by the albedo figure, since conduction and convection mixing. It is also overwhelmed by the slightest change in humidity or dust. Note that the 15 um band in particular is also an H2O band.

Snidely Whiplash wrote:Hypothesis: Increasing the CO@ level in the atmosphere will result in increased temperatures in the upper troposphere, which will lead to increased water vapor int he atmosphere, leading to substantially increased temperatures at ground level and in the other parts of the atmsphere.

Test: increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

Observation: Substantially increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere do not result in higher temperatures in equatorial troposphere, nor to increased temperatures elsewhere.

You're mistaking the model for the reality.

Fuckwit.

Neutrinos (30 years before they were discovered, despite predicted by theory - nobody abandoned the theory), Neptune (20 years before it was discovered, despite being predicted by model).

I have not seen this argument before, so I had to google it.

I found several pages stating that this hot spot in tropics is not a signature of AGW per se, but that it should appear whenever Earth's temperature rises for whatever reasons (natural causes or not) and if the feedback from water vapour is as large as the models assume.

And Earth is getting warmer - do you contest that 2015 was the warmest year on the record, 2nd place goes to 2014, and that out of 16 warmest years in the record, 15 were after 2000?

Google also claims that there is evidence for "short-term hot spots", while evidence for "long-term hot spots" is inconclusive.

In other words, AGW proponents claim there is no evidence for the existence of hot spots, but it's too early to say that there is evidence that hot spots do not exist. Plus they claim the lack of hot spots would be a trouble not specifically for AGW, but for whole knowledge about how climate works.

As one guy in one discussion I tried to follow have put it: we have observed the distinguishing feature of an enhanced greenhouse effect. We have not observed a feature common to all types of warming.

I have just spent 20 minutes or so reading hot discussions between "sceptics" and proponents of AGW, and I got lost quite quickly in the details. As you usual, I would have to either become an expert myself, or respect my time and choose whom to believe.

Last time I looked, all global warming models had failed (by reality escaping their confidence intervals), which was spun by AGW proponents as "the pause". Sorry, not convincing. Then, speaking of the social problems in science, there are all the circumstantial indicators of eager fraud on top of that.

@120 SciVoI was proposing for YEARS that people who are against AGW propose a way to deal with the AGW - I mean, assume just for the sake of the argument AGW is real, how would you deal with that? There was not a single proposal, except "free market would deal with that if there would be a real need". Which makes me think that anti-AGW is not really driven by suspecting the theory, but rather by the need to signal the tribal allegiance ("only leftist traitorous SJWs support AGW! I think AGW is a scam, therefore I am not SJW, but true member of the rightwing tribe!" and "only rightwingers are against AGW! I support AGW, therefore I am true member of the leftwing tribe!").

IMO if AGW is correct (and I think it is correct), then, if there is need to stop it, there is no way to do it short of geo-engineering. Left is, of course, massively against geo-engineering.

@121, @122In the end, IS there a better proof than something that actually works"We don't know why, but it seems to work". Very encouraging

szopen wrote:And Earth is getting warmer - do you contest that 2015 was the warmest year on the record, 2nd place goes to 2014, and that out of 16 warmest years in the record, 15 were after 2000?

False, false, and falseThe hottest year on record remains 1936, despite the fact that NOAA has been steadily and comprehensively altering records of past temperatures..Also, check their definition of "Warmest year on record". It's usually a self-serving, very limited definition of "warmest" that will make you question their sanity. Like "One weather station on Spitzbergen, in the Arctic, which stands in for 5,000,000 km2 of the earth's surface, showed a highest lowest temperature."

Finally, keep in mind that actual temperature records are a very recent thing. Comprehensive temperature records go back only a little over 100 years, and for much of that time were spotty at best. Surface temperature measurements are still spotty over much of the Earth's surface, because it's ocean, and there's no one there to take a measurement. The satellite measurement is the only comprehensive one we have, and they only go back to the late 70s. The satellite record shows no warming at all over the last 18 years, or 27 if you want to cherry-pick data like Warmists do.

Snidely Whiplash wrote:szopen wrote:And Earth is getting warmer - do you contest that 2015 was the warmest year on the record, 2nd place goes to 2014, and that out of 16 warmest years in the record, 15 were after 2000?

False, false, and false

The hottest year on record remains 1936, despite the fact that NOAA has been steadily and comprehensively altering records of past temperatures..

It's not. Globally warmest year is 2015. 1936 was warmest in USA, not globally. Even 1998 was warmest than 1936 globally.

Finally, keep in mind that actual temperature records are a very recent thing. Comprehensive temperature records go back only a little over 100 years, and for much of that time were spotty at best. Surface temperature measurements are still spotty over much of the Earth's surface, because it's ocean, and there's no one there to take a measurement. The satellite measurement is the only comprehensive one we have, and they only go back to the late 70s. The satellite record shows no warming at all over the last 18 years, or 27 if you want to cherry-pick data like Warmists do.

Well, yes, that's why to be precise we are talking about "anomalies", i.e. taking several stations and seeing whether at that point temperature went higher or smaller, and adjusting for urban heat effects and so on.

I don't know about America, but in my home city I definetely believe that we had the warmest December or my life, followed by the warmest January, February and March and so on.

szopen wrote:t's not. Globally warmest year is 2015. 1936 was warmest in USA, not globally. Even 1998 was warmest than 1936 globally.

Finally, keep in mind that actual temperature records are a very recent thing. Comprehensive temperature records go back only a little over 100 years, and for much of that time were spotty at best. Surface temperature measurements are still spotty over much of the Earth's surface, because it's ocean, and there's no one there to take a measurement. The satellite measurement is the only comprehensive one we have, and they only go back to the late 70s. The satellite record shows no warming at all over the last 18 years, or 27 if you want to cherry-pick data like Warmists do.

Well, yes, that's why to be precise we are talking about "anomalies", i.e. taking several stations and seeing whether at that point temperature went higher or smaller, and adjusting for urban heat effects and so on.

Snidely Whiplash is correct on all points. The data has been massaged out of all recognition, Steve Goddard (he is Banned by Twitter too, entries at sjwlist.com) has done a lot of statistical analysis on old weather records and the constantly revised charts produced by NASA, NOAA, and the IPCC. Also lots of material at What's Up With That. Please do your research, and also check out the fact that

!!!THE EARTH IS GETTING GREENER BECAUSE CO2!!!

You can see it playing out this very summer, 2016. Look around you. Look at the actual plants and trees around you. Ask your neighbors 'hey are your plants doing better these days?' This is your future: from here on out for the rest of your life, the vegetation in your world will become more vigorous, healthy, lush. It will grow higher up on the hills and mountains. It will grow higher up in latitude. It will become absolutely impossible to ignore. We're just about there right now.

Spartacus xxxxx wrote:The data has been massaged out of all recognition, Steve Goddard (he is Banned by Twitter too, entries at sjwlist.com) has done a lot of statistical analysis on old weather records and the constantly revised charts produced by NASA, NOAA, and the IPCC. Also lots of material at What's Up With That.

But, you see, I don't trust "what's up with that".

In addition, I do not trust people screaming "data was massaged!" especially when I see the warming here by my own eyes.

!!!THE EARTH IS GETTING GREENER BECAUSE CO2!!!

Actually, what I am seeing is that Poland is getting more and more problems with water, invasion of foreign species, more weeds, more bugs (because they are not dying during winter) and so on. Meaning more herbicides and more pesticides. In press I see news headers like "Poland is turning into a steppe!" and "We need to tackle our water problems" ... and then a whole country decides that we have much more important problems to discuss, as for example whether Obama said "Poland is and will be democracy" or maybe rather "Poland is and needs to continue to be democracy".

szopen wrote:In addition, I do not trust people screaming "data was massaged!" especially when I see the warming here by my own eyes.

2015 was NOT the warmest on record, globally. It's simply a LIE, produced by revising historical data and redefining warmest out of all recognition.The arctic icecap is not melting. The antarctic icecap is growing.

As Warmists are quick to point out when their global warming events are snowed out, weather is not climate.

You don't have to trust Watts Up With That. Go read their articles. Unlike Warmists, they present not only the data, they present the methods used to analyze the data. They also don't censor critics. If you don't like the analysis, you can point out, right there in the comments, where it fails and how to correct it. Many people actually do.

Trusting authority for scientific analysis is exactly what got us here.

Oh, and "The data was massaged" comes directly from comparing current data sets to previous versions of the same datasets. NOAA and NASA have consistently revised historical temperatures downward over the last several years.It's not even open to question.

"The Medieval Warm Period coincides with the Vikings' settlement of Greenland, Iceland and possibly North America. Farmsteads with dairy cattle, pigs, sheep and goats were prevalent in Iceland and along the southern coast of Greenland. Even England was able to compete economically with France in wine production. "

I have not enough expertise to discuss the issue here in detail. All I can do is to read the discussion by the others and decide, which side seems to be more trustworthy.

In my opinion, the side saying that 2015 was the warmest is more trustworthy. I've read a lot of articles stating "denialist lie yet again about satellite record", and showing how RSS and UAH data show the warming. In the end, we would just throw articles at each other and trying to convince, whose method of data calculation is better (because posting raw data, as you obviously know, would be dishonest due to orbit decay etc).

Heck, even taking data from roy spencer (not exactly an "alarmist") you can see the warming, seeing that of the last 5 years, 3 are in top wten armest years covered by satellite record.

And again, 1936 (are you sure 1936, not 1934?) was the warmest year in USA, not globally. Frankly, I tried to google where did you get the information from and all I got was the info that 1934 was warmer in USA than 2012, or that some July in 1936 was the warmest from all Julies on record _in USA_.

I have participated in many discussions about AGW before. I started as a sceptic, till I went into doskonaleszare blog by one climatologist, who within a week destroyed all the arguments which before were always silencing my opponents. During that week I spent a lot of time reading, checking the facts and maths; and in each and every time "warming" side was right, and some of the arguments were blatant lies or partial truths twisted to serve the agenda.

Since that time, every year I see new arguments against warming, and some time ago I stopped to check the facts every time I see a new argument. I made my mind.

MWP and Greenland is a great example of what I am talking about.

RustyFife: Get a map and look where the southern shore of Greenland is, compared to iceland, finland, sweden and norway. You may also want to google "sheeps greenland"or "climate change new perspectives greenland" (did you know they grow potatoes commercially in Greenland, with crops increasing every year?).

You may also want to google something about how warm was actually Greenland during MWP; IIRC it was warmer than in early 1990s, but colder than now. Then check whether MWP was global, or maybe just local (limited to northern hemisphere) phenomenon.

Note I was not discussing whether effects of the warming are bad or good, nor about what methods should be used to counter it if we decide we should fight it.

134 szopen. In my opinion, the side saying that 2015 was the warmest is more trustworthy.

What do you think got to Anthony Watts? Do you think it was brown paper bags of money from Big Oil/ Big Coal. Guys in black hats twirly moustaches, muttering MWAAA HAAA HAAA HARRRR

I'd lay odds you are heavily vaccinated and fluoridated and would 'trust' a doctor to put your grandchildren on Ritalin. No I'm not trying to convince you.

Have you read anything on stomata density in the fossil record? Mammoths with undigested subtropical vegetation in their stomachs? The romans going all over Europe with sandals on their feet? Vineyards in London? Have you met one climate scientist who can accurately predict the cloud level and coverage over one temperate zone for any given day of the year three months in advance? Are you aware of the total oxygen content if fossil amber? Why spiracle respiration insects could have a 1 yard wingspan/ dragon flies? How the mega fauna could get enough food to acquire the sizes they grew to?

Would you ever run a green house experiment yourself? Sorry, your argument comes down to, "I put my trust in"

Where Vietnam or Iraq/ Thalidomide to transorbital frontal lobotomies, the Challenger shuttle crew,

So we can trust Big Physics because it hasn't gone completely nuts and endorsed the non-science of supersymmetry and string theory? But what about what it does endorse which is the increasingly epicycle-like "Standard Model." The model with which we've been stuck in a rut for decades, and which keeps adding particle after particle with no direct evidence. How many is it now? 70? I have no clue. And not just particle after particle, but spins and colors and flavors. Which every new physicist studies like monks study the Bible,after which they become the only experts and the only ones qualified to critique the thing their careers depend upon.

That's not at all what the standard model is. That's like saying chemistry adds epicycles whenever a new element is discovered. Rather, the standard model is a pretty simple set of three forces and a handful of elementary particles bolted together with century-old bog standard group theory from mathematics. All the huge pile of other particles in the zoo are made up from those parts in straightforwardly describable ways, just as the properties of the chemical elements follow from straightforward rules of electron behavior.

It doesn't take monastic devotion to understand it either. In broad strokes the theory is understandable to anyone with an undergrad-math-major equivalent math background and some time on their hands.

szopen wrote:Actually, what I am seeing is that Poland is getting more and more problems with water, invasion of foreign species, more weeds, more bugs (because they are not dying during winter) and so on. Meaning more herbicides and more pesticides. In press I see news headers like "Poland is turning into a steppe!" and "We need to tackle our water problems"

Thanks, that's interesting. Water problems might be the major contributor to this. Or it might be getting blown out of proportion.

According to this map, Poland has enjoyed a net decrease of farm land, as have most of the world's populated areas. http://blog.nature.org/science/files/2014/06/global-ag-map.jpg

Phillip George wrote:This is gob smacking amazing. You want to disprove a theory which has no corroborative data sets, by insisting another theory replace it for the non existent event?I'm sure you've had corroborative data sets like this one thrown in your face many times, and you ignored the clear information right up there in the front like this:Nocturnal minimum temperatures have increased three times faster than daytime maximum temperatures, an effect observed worldwide. The difference between day and night temperature ranges has notably decreased over the past sixty years...When someone prints out the data and nails it to your forehead with a 24-penny spike you will have to stop denying it. But the print will have to be awfully small to save you just from the thickness of the paper.

because science like rayciss.Because people who can't think and take their positions on scientific matters from tribal leaders of zero expertise are JUST LIKE THE WORTHLESS DINDUS.

Who has the best algorithm for predicting the distribution of cloud forming condensation nuclei between 5000 and 8000 feet between the july and august between the equator and tropic of cancer. Over to you Mr Rational for your preference in predictive algorithms.If you ask such questions of people who are not climate scientists and claim no expertise, you are not qualified to ask them.

Snidely Whiplash wrote:why is not the upper troposphere in the equatorial latitudes not warming. All CO2-based global warming models agree on thisWrong. The models agree that the greatest effects will be seen at high latitudes. You provide no source for your claim and you also misrepresent mine, which relates to the height of the tropopause and thus the depth of the layer where normal temperature lapse rates apply and thus how much warmer the surface is than the tropopause.

Sorry if I use long sentences requiring good reading comprehension skills. I do not dumb down my language for idiots.

Spartacus xxxxx wrote:Either show where I proclaimed myself to be an "expert on this matter" or accept that you are a liar.You declared "CO2 does not cause global warming", implicitly declaring you have the expertise to back it up against the work of climate scientists for over a century.

Arrhenius was mistaken. He did not understand how a greenhouse operatesCan't understand that "greenhouse effect" is a metaphor. Idiocy confirmed.

The optical depth for CO2 absorbance in the 15 um and 4 um bands at STP and 400 ppm is on the order of 100 meter AGLOptical depth is not measured in meters. Bogus claim of expertise re-confirmed.

SciVo wrote:Hypothesis: AGW drum-beaters don't even care if they're right, since their feigned concern is really to promote international socialism.Idiots. You can throw all of that nonsense out with a simple test:1. Where have carbon emissions from electric generation been brought pretty close to zero? Answer: Sweden, France and Ontario.2. What is the common thing between these polities? Answer: heavy reliance on nuclear power assisted by hydro.3. Are the international socialists pushing nuclear power as the solution to climate change? Answer: Do you need to ask? They're rabidly against it.

As I keep telling you over and over, the traitors are the ones trying to keep us from using nuclear power. Nuclear fuel costs next to nothing. There is no need for massive international trade in energy in a nuclear world. When you hear an international socialist raving about some problem, you can be certain their solution is wrong... but only the solution. They could not get traction if all their problems were bogus.

Now read the above 2 paragraphs over and over until you understand them. Go look around and test them against reality. If you have the courage and integrity to do that, you will have to admit that I am right, the socialists are wrong (of course), and your opinion leaders have been cucked.

If anti-carbon activists go for the proposal, then the hypothesis is disconfirmed.Citizens Climate Lobby is pushing for a national carbon-free-and-dividend system. It has zero traction in Congress, no doubt because it has no profit upside for Goldman-Sachs.

I have to stop at comment #122 and pick this up again tomorrow. Out of time.

looks like they mounted it next to an airconditioning duct in a car park down wind of the best available heat sinks. And from the looks of it by the public funding teat you have been well nourished your long career. But I will hyperventilate a little later, I have work to do. Thanks for the reading

I'm still busy, but want to get this down on the page. You seem to be someone preoccupied with the minutiae of the barely relevant.I wanted the data specific to weather balloons in rural locations of altitudes between 5000 and 8000 ft agl. I'm not saying backscatter isn't doing something curious. I'm saying CO2 is irrelevant. Just run a control variable experiment on an identical planet. But you really aren't a big picture man. No, you don't get it.... and that is bizarre.

Have you read anything on stomata density in the fossil record? Mammoths with undigested subtropical vegetation in their stomachs? The romans going all over Europe with sandals on their feet? Vineyards in London? But you do realise that this is completely irrevelant?

Me: "Hey, I think Paul an hour ago hit Mark in the head" You: "No, that's impossible, because Mark was hit by Jim"

Once again, there was a time _I was a sceptic_. There was a time when I was carefully checking the arguments for and against. "One vulcano eruption emits more CO2 that all humanity in one year" "models do not account for solar activity" "solar activity is perfectly correlated with climate changes" "changes in CO2 levels follow temperature, not the other way around" "human emissions are only a fraction of CO2 natural emission, therefore humanity cannot be responsible for rises in CO2 levels" "there was once scientific consensus that we are going into ice age" "there were once higher CO2 level concentration and everything was just fine" "look at this period of ancient history, the temperatures were changing with no changes to CO2 levels" "models do not account for urban heat effect"... And so on. After checking each of those arguments "warmists" were right, while arguments against AGW appeared to be either lies, to be dishonest misrepresentation of facts/theory, or reveal complete misunderstanding of the theory. The only argument I have ever read which was honest was about CO2 saturation, and it took me a lot of time to understand why it was wrong.

Why should I now pay attention to new arguments I haven't read before? What's the probability that THIS TIME they would be right?

Communism failed in every country on earth, and every time leftists were saying "it works this time! look at the gdp growth figures!" and then it collapses and it seems GDP figures were falsified. Imagine now a guy would say "this time communism works! Look at the Venesuela! And it's different this time because X".

Would you condemn me for ignoring this guy and refusing to waste my time on even reading his "new reasons communism will work this time for sure"?

szopen, it is precisely as relevant as any and every proxy from Ice cores, to tree rings, to glacial varves.You and Mr Rational don't realize the presuppositional basis of normalcy bias taking place here or anywhere.

People constantly want to extrapolate from their normality into the past present and futures. Its intellectual geocentricism.Again, I don't expect you or your "kind" to understand what is in front of you in black and white.

I recognize a million conversations like this won't necessarily do yourselves the slightest good however.

1. How many carbon atoms are on earth up to and including 100 km AGL.2. How many carbon atoms are now in coal depositories.3. What percentage of atoms now in coal depositories were above ground level?4. When the greater percentage of total carbon atoms was at or above ground level was more or less plant and animal life on the surface of the earth?

these are big picture questions. Not shitty little infra red reading from a hand full of locations within half of one human lifespan, with adjustments hidden from view.

@147Here is another one: assuming higher CO2 levels do not influence the climate, assuming you believe astrophysics that Sun was cooler in the past...

What other theory you see to explain the fact that there were periods were Earth was warmer despite Sun was cooler, and why you decide not to use Ockham razor and choose a theory which explains dozen things at once?

szopen wrote:I was proposing for YEARS that people who are against AGW propose a way to deal with the AGWI keep telling people: NUCLEAR POWER. Low-enriched uranium is about $0.60 per million BTU and costs next to nothing to deliver. You can literally stockpile years of the stuff on-site if you need that much security. Spent fuel goes into minuscule steel and concrete casks that then sit and do nothing. Nuclear power can light your city, heat it too including keeping all your streets and sidewalks ice-free, and charge all your electric cars.

Compare to the massive amounts of money that changes hands for fossil fuels and their shipping and disposal of e.g. coal ash. You can see why the FF companies are scared stiff of uranium.

@137 Great summary, Matt.

@144 That is exactly what I've seen everywhere as well. The so-called "skeptics" are remarkably un-skeptical about their own claims. If you ask them "where's the massive surge in volcanic activity that's driving our rising year-on-year CO2 levels?" they do not point to sources, they call you a communist or something.

Phillip George wrote:You and Mr Rational don't realize the presuppositional basis of normalcy bias taking place here or anywhere.Normalcy bias, like accepting as normal the burning billions of tons of fossil fuels every year which absolutely cannot last more than a few hundred years because they'll all be gone?

When you can say something so utterly hypocritical without a shred of irony, it means there is something wrong with your head.

PhillipGeorge(c)2016 wrote:coal is plant and planet fertilizer that was previously in the biosphere.Coal is carbon that left the biosphere during the Carboniferous era.

How a physics buff can't see this beggars belief.Well, you see, idiot, it's like this:

1. The Carboniferous ended 300 million years ago. Do you notice any serious lack of life on Earth since then? Everything I like about Earth, including me, developed under very different conditions and may depend on them.

2. The Sun's output increases by about 1% every 100 million years. Its output was some 3% lower at the end of the Carboniferous than it is today. Earth today cannot tolerate the levels of GHGs that it required then.

This is pretty basic stuff, but you have to be able to consider facts outside the propaganda your corrupted opinion leaders are spoon-feeding you.

It says you are a deeply religious man.RJWs always project.

The atmosphere is a lot thinner than it was. Mankind may not be able to restore the biosphere but liberating carbon atoms is a very small step towards same.So your model of the ideal Earth is... Venus. Your cucked opinion leaders have you believing that turning Earth into another scorched ball of rock is wonderful so long as they stay on top and escape the consequences. You are a very, very stupid person.

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